We’ve now found more than 1,800 planets orbiting distant stars.
Unfortunately, they’re all too far away for us to send probes to, let alone visit in person. But that didn’t stop NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory from making a set of beautiful travel posters for three exoplanets from the “Exoplanet Travel Bureau,” in a style reminiscent of the WPA’s “See America” posters from the 1930s.
This one, for Kepler-186f — one of the first potentially rocky planets found that might be the right temperature for liquid water — shows red plants, which hypothetically might exist because they’ve adapted to harness the infrared light emitted by the planet’s star.
The planet HD 40307g, meanwhile, is many times more massive than Earth, which would mean that its gravity is much stronger.
Finally, there’s Kepler-16b, the first planet confirmed to orbit two different stars, a bit like Tatooine. It’s certainly way too cold for life — and might be a gas giant, rather than a rocky planet as pictured — but it’s still pretty cool to imagine what it’d be like to see two suns in the sky.
Correction: This post previously said that, on Kepler-186f, plants adapting to red wavelengths of light — instead of infrared light — could make them appear red.
